5 ms·

Creators / maintainers owe us nothing, but I am always slightly bummed when I don't see a reason for the discontinuation. Can speculate all day of course, and

Creators / maintainers owe us nothing, but I am always slightly bummed when I don't see a reason for the discontinuation. Can speculate all day of course, and any reason is a good one. Again, I know they don't owe us anything, even an explanation, but curiosity always gets the best of me.

teddyh 2y ago
> Creators / maintainers owe us nothing I would argue that they do, in fact, owe us something. All people who make public announcements are in effect holding a conversation with the public, until such time as they publicly announce its end. A person in a conversation is socially obligated to make reasonable attempts to speak and respond to other people’s questions, comments, and concerns. If they don’t, or suddenly stop, they have abandoned the social etiquette of a conversation. This is not the public “being entitled” (as some like to claim), but is instead the quite reasonable expectations of the public who was led into a conversation with somebody who did not, or ceased to, respect the social rules. (I should not need to say this, but in addition to being a user of many software projects, I am myself a maintainer of software publicly available – in official Linux distributions, even. I do not think that I ask my fellow maintainers for much – only a smidgen of respect for their users.) (Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301710#38304918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301710#38304918>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073908#22074287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073908#22074287>)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- baq 2y ago
  The tax you’re describing is exactly why maintainers burn out and why open source projects die, or worse - they’re never born. The only way to win is not to play.
  - belorn 2y ago
    It is very similar to club activities and volunteer work. People burn out fast when they stop finding value in the work. It is exceptional common with instructors where say parents pay to a club for their children membership, where the parents might not be fully aware that the cost of operation would be significant higher if the people involved were paid employees rather than people volunteering their time. One has to regularly remind people about the social aspects that are the foundation of such activity, and that the activity can only exist when enough people join in and help. When that fails you get very high burnout rates which quickly can cause a death spiral of the whole activity. Normally such activity comes with one year commitments. Leaving in the middle of things unannounced and without warning would be breaking the social etiquette. No one is forced to work but there are social expectations and obligations in social activities. How much open source project is similar to such activity, and how much social expectation there are will depend on the context. For example, if you are volunteering as treasurer to a large open source project, the expectations are going to be very similar to that of a club, as will the burn out if the person doing the work don't get value from it.
- henning 2y ago
  The social etiquette is set by the license the code is distributed under, which says things like "THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE" in all caps. That social etiquette indicates that maintainers don't owe you shit.
  - teddyh 2y ago
    That’s the legal warranty disclaimer. It has nothing to do with support, security fixes, or future development, and certainly does not speak about simply being reasonably responsive when being contacted by users. Also, and this might be hard for overly rules-obsessed people to understand, this is not a legal matter. It is a matter of social etiquette. I of course agree that nobody is legally owed anything. But this is not about legality.
    - closewith 2y ago
      > It has nothing to do with support, security fixes, or future development, and certainly does not speak about simply being reasonably responsive when being contacted by users. Actually, if you re-read the GP, all of those points are covered. You just don't like the answer.
      - teddyh 2y ago
        They are covered in a legal sense. But that was not what we were discussing.
        closewith 2y ago
        Funnily enough, if you re-read it, everything you mentioned is covered. You just don't like the sentiment.
  - BrenBarn 2y ago
    That's not the social etiquette, that's the legal situation.
- brudgers 2y ago
  A person in a conversation is socially obligated to make reasonable attempts to speak and respond to other people’s questions, comments, and concerns. Slaves and servants and subjects have the obligation you describe. It is the nature of their bondage. Asking questions and complaining and unsolicited opining are hallmarks privilege. To the extent a social contract is a contract, it requires both parties to receive consideration.
  - teddyh 2y ago
    Comparing mainainers being socially obligated to respond to questions to actual slavery, is unseemly. If people don’t want the social burden of being a public person or even the relatively small burden of having a public project, they have the option of not being public.
    - marcus0x62 2y ago
      Or -- stay with me -- they have the option of running their public project in the manner and with the level of effort they want. If you don't like that, you are free to run your own projects according to your own standards.
      - teddyh 2y ago
        People “have the option” to say whatever they want – it’s called Free Speech, and it’s an important legal right. But that does not mean that I think that everything people do say is right and proper. I can, and will, criticize people for what they say, and I will also criticize maintainers who treat their users with less than reasonable respect. You are conflating legal rights with what is socially or ethically right, and I think this is a dubious rhetorical trick.
        marcus0x62 2y ago
        I don't "keep" doing anything - this is the first and only time I've ever replied to one of your comments, nor have I said anything that a reasonable person could construe as conflating legal obligations and social etiquette. I'm well aware of the difference between between the two concepts. What I, along with basically everyone else in this thread, is telling you is that this social obligation on the part of open source maintainers you seem the believe in is not a thing. People who give away their software for free do not owe any debt to anyone who might choose to use that software. As I said to the 1 (one) other person who seems to agree with you here, the relevant social etiquette is "don't look a gift horse in the mouth."
- evanelias 2y ago
  > All people who make public announcements are in effect holding a conversation with the public No, they're not. Unlike a conversation, a public announcement is a one-way, one-to-many communication. > A person in a conversation is socially obligated to make reasonable attempts to speak and respond to other people’s questions, comments, and concerns. In a social setting, with a limited number of participants, sure. But in an internet forum, with an unlimited number of participants, people fail to make reasonable attempts to respond to the entirety of others' comments on a fairly regular basis. And there is absolutely no widespread social obligation otherwise. But this is all entirely irrelevant anyway, because a software project is not the same thing as a conversation in the first place: > the quite reasonable expectations of the public who was led into a conversation with somebody who did not, or ceased to, respect the social rules. Using someone's free software is quite clearly not even remotely the same thing as being "led into a conversation", so there's no reason to expect the same social obligations.
  - teddyh 2y ago
    > respond to the entirety of others' comments You are mischaracterizing what I wrote. I did not say the entirety of others’s comments; I explicitly wrote only “make reasonable attempts”. > Using someone's free software is quite clearly not even remotely the same thing as being "led into a conversation", so there's no reason to expect the same social obligations. Users are still completely reasonable in expecting something. Consider my hypothetical situation I described in the second paragraph here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310060>.
    - evanelias 2y ago
      > I did not say the entirety of others’s comments; I explicitly wrote only “make reasonable attempts”. OK, but that's still clearly not the widespread social norm in internet forums. For better or worse, it's quite common for commenters to not make any reasonable attempt to respond to sub-threads. > Users are still completely reasonable in expecting something. Consider my hypothetical situation I completely disagree. Your hypothetical situation sounds absolutely like entitlement to me.
mmaunder 2y ago
Agreed. Sometimes it’s personal challenges or tragedy. So perhaps best to let it lie if it’s not volunteered.
hinkley 2y ago
I think a lot of open source maintainers start before they have found their favorite languages. And now you have a problem if you see that the language you wrote your library in creates a bunch of make-work problems that you can solve by switching languages. How do you retire without it sounding like an insult to the ecosystem and the people who helped you make the product good? If he keeps pushing commits, I won’t place bets but would say don’t be surprised if they’re in a new language.
- fra 2y ago
  I think this is the reason in fewer 0.01% of cases. Languages are not in the top 10 things that make being an open source maintainer difficult.
- teddyh 2y ago
  > How do you retire without it sounding like an insult to the ecosystem and the people who helped you make the product good? I would think it’s fairly simple. Announce your retirement from the project, and assign the project leadership and commit rights (or whatever GitHub uses) to whoever you feel would be a good fit, or the most frequent contributor, or simply to the most recent one. But most anything would be better than locking the repository and vanishing without a word.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    Okay but… it looks like he made 9 times as many commits as the second most frequent committer and 6 times as many as the top two combined. Who do you suppose he should hand it off to? This smells like a “nobody appreciates how much I’ve been carrying this project” situation. That complicates things.
    - teddyh 2y ago
      > Who do you suppose he should hand it off to? Like I said, anyone would be better than nobody.
      - 2y ago
gwerbret 2y ago
There's an important discussion in the sub-thread by @teddyh that has unfortunately been voted dead, so I thought I would comment on it here instead. I suspect teddyh is being criticized for use of the word "obligation", so maybe I can clarify. People can create and operate channels on YouTube for free. Yet we frequently see reports of Google acting unreasonably towards people who come to depend on YouTube, often for their livelihood. We expect Google to act morally by providing the bare minimum of human oversight when a person's channel has been banned by an AI mistake. But there is no legal or ethical obligation, because YouTube is "free", and Google just doesn't care enough about morals. We also see lots of examples of FOSS authors getting burned out when their sense of morality is used and abused by users. That's also not okay. But perhaps we can aim for a happy medium where the "norm" assumes people can be reasonable, mature adults. No one wins when we optimize for the outliers.
- shagie 2y ago
  > ... in the sub-thread by @teddyh that has unfortunately been voted dead ... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html > Dead posts aren't displayed by default, but you can see them all by turning on 'showdead' in your profile. > If you see a [dead] post that shouldn't be dead, you can vouch for it. Click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'vouch' at the top. When enough users do this, the post is restored. There's a small karma threshold before vouch links appear. I'm not sure if your karma is sufficient for that action, but it's not a dead comment anymore.
  - gwerbret 2y ago
    Yes I see that now, thanks!
- nijave 2y ago
  Youtube the relationship is largely bidirectional where both sides are profiting FOSS often times consumers are profiting and maintainers are not (and many times maintainers are investing/spending instead)
- teddyh 2y ago

teddyh 2y ago

> Creators / maintainers owe us nothing I would argue that they do, in fact, owe us something. All people who make public announcements are in effect holding a conversation with the public, until such time as they publicly announce its end. A person in a conversation is socially obligated to make reasonable attempts to speak and respond to other people’s questions, comments, and concerns. If they don’t, or suddenly stop, they have abandoned the social etiquette of a conversation. This is not the public “being entitled” (as some like to claim), but is instead the quite reasonable expectations of the public who was led into a conversation with somebody who did not, or ceased to, respect the social rules. (I should not need to say this, but in addition to being a user of many software projects, I am myself a maintainer of software publicly available – in official Linux distributions, even. I do not think that I ask my fellow maintainers for much – only a smidgen of respect for their users.) (Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301710#38304918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301710#38304918>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073908#22074287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073908#22074287>)

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
baq 2y ago
The tax you’re describing is exactly why maintainers burn out and why open source projects die, or worse - they’re never born. The only way to win is not to play.
- belorn 2y ago
  It is very similar to club activities and volunteer work. People burn out fast when they stop finding value in the work. It is exceptional common with instructors where say parents pay to a club for their children membership, where the parents might not be fully aware that the cost of operation would be significant higher if the people involved were paid employees rather than people volunteering their time. One has to regularly remind people about the social aspects that are the foundation of such activity, and that the activity can only exist when enough people join in and help. When that fails you get very high burnout rates which quickly can cause a death spiral of the whole activity. Normally such activity comes with one year commitments. Leaving in the middle of things unannounced and without warning would be breaking the social etiquette. No one is forced to work but there are social expectations and obligations in social activities. How much open source project is similar to such activity, and how much social expectation there are will depend on the context. For example, if you are volunteering as treasurer to a large open source project, the expectations are going to be very similar to that of a club, as will the burn out if the person doing the work don't get value from it.
henning 2y ago
The social etiquette is set by the license the code is distributed under, which says things like "THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE" in all caps. That social etiquette indicates that maintainers don't owe you shit.
- teddyh 2y ago
  That’s the legal warranty disclaimer. It has nothing to do with support, security fixes, or future development, and certainly does not speak about simply being reasonably responsive when being contacted by users. Also, and this might be hard for overly rules-obsessed people to understand, this is not a legal matter. It is a matter of social etiquette. I of course agree that nobody is legally owed anything. But this is not about legality.
  - closewith 2y ago
    > It has nothing to do with support, security fixes, or future development, and certainly does not speak about simply being reasonably responsive when being contacted by users. Actually, if you re-read the GP, all of those points are covered. You just don't like the answer.
    - teddyh 2y ago
      They are covered in a legal sense. But that was not what we were discussing.
      - closewith 2y ago
        Funnily enough, if you re-read it, everything you mentioned is covered. You just don't like the sentiment.
- BrenBarn 2y ago
  That's not the social etiquette, that's the legal situation.
brudgers 2y ago
A person in a conversation is socially obligated to make reasonable attempts to speak and respond to other people’s questions, comments, and concerns. Slaves and servants and subjects have the obligation you describe. It is the nature of their bondage. Asking questions and complaining and unsolicited opining are hallmarks privilege. To the extent a social contract is a contract, it requires both parties to receive consideration.
- teddyh 2y ago
  Comparing mainainers being socially obligated to respond to questions to actual slavery, is unseemly. If people don’t want the social burden of being a public person or even the relatively small burden of having a public project, they have the option of not being public.
  - marcus0x62 2y ago
    Or -- stay with me -- they have the option of running their public project in the manner and with the level of effort they want. If you don't like that, you are free to run your own projects according to your own standards.
    - teddyh 2y ago
      People “have the option” to say whatever they want – it’s called Free Speech, and it’s an important legal right. But that does not mean that I think that everything people do say is right and proper. I can, and will, criticize people for what they say, and I will also criticize maintainers who treat their users with less than reasonable respect. You are conflating legal rights with what is socially or ethically right, and I think this is a dubious rhetorical trick.
      - marcus0x62 2y ago
        I don't "keep" doing anything - this is the first and only time I've ever replied to one of your comments, nor have I said anything that a reasonable person could construe as conflating legal obligations and social etiquette. I'm well aware of the difference between between the two concepts. What I, along with basically everyone else in this thread, is telling you is that this social obligation on the part of open source maintainers you seem the believe in is not a thing. People who give away their software for free do not owe any debt to anyone who might choose to use that software. As I said to the 1 (one) other person who seems to agree with you here, the relevant social etiquette is "don't look a gift horse in the mouth."
evanelias 2y ago
> All people who make public announcements are in effect holding a conversation with the public No, they're not. Unlike a conversation, a public announcement is a one-way, one-to-many communication. > A person in a conversation is socially obligated to make reasonable attempts to speak and respond to other people’s questions, comments, and concerns. In a social setting, with a limited number of participants, sure. But in an internet forum, with an unlimited number of participants, people fail to make reasonable attempts to respond to the entirety of others' comments on a fairly regular basis. And there is absolutely no widespread social obligation otherwise. But this is all entirely irrelevant anyway, because a software project is not the same thing as a conversation in the first place: > the quite reasonable expectations of the public who was led into a conversation with somebody who did not, or ceased to, respect the social rules. Using someone's free software is quite clearly not even remotely the same thing as being "led into a conversation", so there's no reason to expect the same social obligations.
- teddyh 2y ago
  > respond to the entirety of others' comments You are mischaracterizing what I wrote. I did not say the entirety of others’s comments; I explicitly wrote only “make reasonable attempts”. > Using someone's free software is quite clearly not even remotely the same thing as being "led into a conversation", so there's no reason to expect the same social obligations. Users are still completely reasonable in expecting something. Consider my hypothetical situation I described in the second paragraph here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310060>.
  - evanelias 2y ago
    > I did not say the entirety of others’s comments; I explicitly wrote only “make reasonable attempts”. OK, but that's still clearly not the widespread social norm in internet forums. For better or worse, it's quite common for commenters to not make any reasonable attempt to respond to sub-threads. > Users are still completely reasonable in expecting something. Consider my hypothetical situation I completely disagree. Your hypothetical situation sounds absolutely like entitlement to me.

mmaunder 2y ago

Agreed. Sometimes it’s personal challenges or tragedy. So perhaps best to let it lie if it’s not volunteered.

hinkley 2y ago

I think a lot of open source maintainers start before they have found their favorite languages. And now you have a problem if you see that the language you wrote your library in creates a bunch of make-work problems that you can solve by switching languages. How do you retire without it sounding like an insult to the ecosystem and the people who helped you make the product good? If he keeps pushing commits, I won’t place bets but would say don’t be surprised if they’re in a new language.

fra 2y ago
I think this is the reason in fewer 0.01% of cases. Languages are not in the top 10 things that make being an open source maintainer difficult.
teddyh 2y ago
> How do you retire without it sounding like an insult to the ecosystem and the people who helped you make the product good? I would think it’s fairly simple. Announce your retirement from the project, and assign the project leadership and commit rights (or whatever GitHub uses) to whoever you feel would be a good fit, or the most frequent contributor, or simply to the most recent one. But most anything would be better than locking the repository and vanishing without a word.
- hinkley 2y ago
  Okay but… it looks like he made 9 times as many commits as the second most frequent committer and 6 times as many as the top two combined. Who do you suppose he should hand it off to? This smells like a “nobody appreciates how much I’ve been carrying this project” situation. That complicates things.
  - teddyh 2y ago
    > Who do you suppose he should hand it off to? Like I said, anyone would be better than nobody.
    - 2y ago

gwerbret 2y ago

There's an important discussion in the sub-thread by @teddyh that has unfortunately been voted dead, so I thought I would comment on it here instead. I suspect teddyh is being criticized for use of the word "obligation", so maybe I can clarify. People can create and operate channels on YouTube for free. Yet we frequently see reports of Google acting unreasonably towards people who come to depend on YouTube, often for their livelihood. We expect Google to act morally by providing the bare minimum of human oversight when a person's channel has been banned by an AI mistake. But there is no legal or ethical obligation, because YouTube is "free", and Google just doesn't care enough about morals. We also see lots of examples of FOSS authors getting burned out when their sense of morality is used and abused by users. That's also not okay. But perhaps we can aim for a happy medium where the "norm" assumes people can be reasonable, mature adults. No one wins when we optimize for the outliers.

shagie 2y ago
> ... in the sub-thread by @teddyh that has unfortunately been voted dead ... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html > Dead posts aren't displayed by default, but you can see them all by turning on 'showdead' in your profile. > If you see a [dead] post that shouldn't be dead, you can vouch for it. Click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'vouch' at the top. When enough users do this, the post is restored. There's a small karma threshold before vouch links appear. I'm not sure if your karma is sufficient for that action, but it's not a dead comment anymore.
- gwerbret 2y ago
  Yes I see that now, thanks!
nijave 2y ago
Youtube the relationship is largely bidirectional where both sides are profiting FOSS often times consumers are profiting and maintainers are not (and many times maintainers are investing/spending instead)
teddyh 2y ago